Every week in the United States about 19,000 open surgical breast biopsies are performed on women. Only about 3000 cancers will be found. Thus, about 85% of the biopsies are unnecessary. This means about 16,000 women will needlessly undergo open surgical breast biopsies in the U.S. every week because of the inaccuracy in diagnosing cancerous tissue in the breast.
Open surgical breast biopsies are highly undesirable because they are invasive and traumatic to the patient. In a surgical biopsy, the suspected location of the abnormality would be marked with a thin, hooked guide wire. The surgeon tracts the guide wire to the location of the suspected abnormality and the suspect area is excised. The open surgical biopsy is the most common form of biopsy and is invasive, painful and undesirable to the patient. The open surgical biopsies may also leave scar tissue which may obscure the diagnostic ability of future mammograms, creating a major handicap for the patient.
Another form of biopsy is a large-core needle biopsy (14 gauge needle). The standard core biopsies remove a 1 mm×17 mm core of tissue. The large core needle biopsy is less invasive than a surgical biopsy but still removes an undesirable amount of tissue.
Still another form of biopsy is the stereo tactic fine needle aspiration biopsy. In this type of biopsy, a small amount of the cells are aspirated for cytological analysis. This procedure is minimally invasive. A shortcoming, however, with stereo tactic biopsies is poor accuracy. The poor accuracy is a result of the small sample size which makes accurate cytology difficult.
Another drawback of typical biopsy procedures is the length of time required for the laboratory to review and analyze the excised tissue sample. The wait can take, on average, approximately two months from the first exam to final diagnosis. Consequently, many women may experience intense anxiety while waiting for a final determination.
Various methods and devices have been developed to measure physical characteristics of tissue in an effort to distinguish between cancerous and non-cancerous tissue. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 5,303,026 to Strobl et al. (the Strobl patent) describes an apparatus and method for spectroscopic analysis of scattering media such as biological tissue. More specifically, the Strobl patent describes an apparatus and method for real-time generation and collection of fluorescence, reflection, scattering, and absorption information from a tissue sample to which multiple excitation wavelengths are applied.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,349,954 to Tiemann et al. also describes an instrument for characterizing tissue. The instrument includes, amongst other things a hollow needle for delivering light from a monochromator through the needle to a desired tissue region. Mounted in the shaft of the needle is a photodiode having a light sensitive surface facing outward from the shaft for detecting back-scattered light from the tissue region.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,800,350 to Coppleson et al. discloses an apparatus for tissue type recognition. In particular, an apparatus includes a probe configured to contact the tissue and subject the tissue to a plurality of different stimuli such as electrical, light, heat, sound, magnetic and to detect plural physical responses to the stimuli. The apparatus also includes a processor that processes the responses in combination in order to categorize the tissue. The processing occurs in real-time with an indication of the tissue type (e.g. normal, pre-cancerous/cancerous, or unknown) being provided to an operator of the apparatus.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,109,270 to Mah et al. (the Mah patent) discloses a multimodality instrument for tissue characterization. In one configuration shown in the Mah patent, a system with a multimodality instrument for tissue identification includes a computer-controlled motor driven heuristic probe with a multisensory tip.
Notwithstanding the above, there still exists a need for a convenient and reliable multisensor probe that can provide real time analysis of multiple tissue properties. In particular, a multisensor probe and system in accordance with the present invention is desirable.